I was watching Jon Stewart the other day as he delved into the Chick Fil A controversy. It was surprisingly even handed, but there was one bit that irritated me. He had two of his correspondents at his desk to discuss CFA. One was eating a CFA sandwich and the other was morally outraged about it. Through the course of the skit they each realize that companies they like do things that are morally questionable, such as Apple and child labor. However the downside they presented for CFA was that it pays for its employees to go to college and provides other benefits. The pro CFA person screams out at the perceived socialism and abandons CFA.

This strikes at the biggest misconception about Conservatives, that just because we are against the government doing one specific thing, we are against government in general. The problem isn’t helping people go to school, it’s the government taking money away from someone to buy things for others. CFA scholarship programs are exactly the type of thing that conservatives are advocating in place of government meddling. Both parties benefit from the arrangement; the employee gets help educating himself and CFA gets a motivated employee who is there to impress his employers. The goal of the free market is for individuals to enter into mutually beneficial agreements, which CFA ably demonstrates. Its performance and customer satisfaction proves that its policies are working.

This brings us back to the misconception. Conservatives need to work on pushing their good ideas forward, not just stonewalling the Left’s bad ones.
People have been relying on the government to provide them with things for centuries…and it doesn’t work. That’s why free market capitalism came to be. Along the way of this new way of thinking, we have lost our way. The Left’s policies are not ground breaking or revolutionary, they are the same old thing. We must remind the world of this, and Chick-fil-A is a shining example.

Categories: Blog Posts